The low-end Android phone market is getting increasingly crowded, which makes it ever harder to stand out, and unfortunately we're not sure that the LG Optimus L3 2 does quite enough to.

It does some things well, such as providing good battery life, but it also does some things very poorly, for example the screen resolution, and as a complete package it's a hard sell.

We liked

Good battery life is a major boon for any smartphone, so it's great to see that the LG Optimus L3 II manages it. Contact management is done well too, pulling information in from social networks and making it as quick as possible to actually call someone.

It's also got a decent music player and some useful extra features, such as the ability to have text messages pop up on the screen, and a bunch of customisation options for your home screen.

Safety Care is a potentially very handy feature too, and along with the low price tag it makes the phone a good bet to get for a child or elderly family member.

We disliked

We really weren't fans of the screen on the LG Optimus L3 2. Sure, it's responsive, which is the first screen test that a low-end handset has to pass, but it failed at the second hurdle by being incredibly low resolution.

If you mostly just want to use it as a phone and plan to spend minimal time actually looking at the screen then it's fine, but presumably many users will want to make use of its smartphone features such as web browsing and apps, none of which is much fun when everything is so pixelated and difficult to see.

The build quality doesn't seem great either, since it has a rather flimsy back cover. Plus there's also not much built-in storage, the camera won't impress anyone and the phone can sometimes lag - even when just moving around home screens.

Verdict

The LG Optimus L3 2 is likely to really struggle to compete in the budget phone market. If you just want a feature phone you can get one for less, while if you want a smartphone you can get a substantially better one for not much more.

For the same sort of money you can get the much better Huawei Ascend G330, or the slightly better HTC Desire C. If you take out a contract you can even find the Nokia Lumia 520 for around the same monthly price - granted that's Windows Phone rather than Android, but it's in a whole other league.

The LG Optimus L3 2 isn't an out and out bad phone, but neither is it really good enough to make a convincing argument for you to part with your hard-earned cash.